[MacRuby-devel] Is is possible to debug a MacRuby Cocoa app?

[Ryan Porter]

Hello, and thank you very much to the developers of MacRuby.  It's an amazing technology and I hope to see it continue to grow.

I've managed to figure out, after an hour or two of wasted time, that although MacRuby now includes a debugger, that debugger can't be used to debug a MacRuby Cocoa app.  Not only through XCode, but at all.  Is that correct?  The release notes proudly announce that MacRuby now includes a debugger but they neglect to mention how to use it.  After some research I eventually discovered that there is no way to use the debugger to debug a Cocoa app.

If that's true, then lack of a debugger eliminates any benefit that using Ruby could bring to the Cocoa experience.  Objective C syntax is truly nasty, but if there is no debugger available for Cocoa apps written with MacRuby then it just doesn't make sense to use Ruby to make a Cocoa app.  Especially with Objective C 2.0's simplified syntax and garbage collection.  "You don't need a debugger for Ruby code", is simply not a realistic solution.  TDD and BDD tools for desktop Cocoa apps are still inadequate, and even with TDD you often still need a debugger.

MacRuby isn't going to go very far if developers are forced to revert to printf debugging to build Cocoa apps.  I don't mind if the debugger doesn't have slick XCode integration like GDB.  But there needs to be SOME way to debug a Cocoa app or else the sensible path for developer productivity on the Mac will be Objective C 2.0 instead of MacRuby.  Sacrificing any hope of using a debugger to gain relatively minor syntactic improvements is not a tradeoff that makes any sense.  I don't intend to disparage MacRuby, I just want to share my perspective as both a professional Rubyist and a professional Cocoa developer.  MacRuby is an amazing technology, but to gain traction as a realistic way to build Cocoa apps it will really need a debugger that works with Cocoa apps.

--
Ryan

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